Jay Halstead's Theory of Disappearing
by water4willows
Summary: Jay's gunshot wound in 6x02 is not quite as "through and through" as everyone thought. Queue the whump. My submission to the 2018 winter Whump Fic Exchange over on Tumblr.


" _The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart." - St. Jerome_

He feels nothing. Lights flash as the body of the man who killed his father is wheeled past him, but Jay Halstead doesn't register any of it. He's numb as they patch him up in the back of the ambulance. Blank as he fakes remorse and Hailey walks away from him with tears in her eyes. Vacant as Hank takes her place and starts in on him in that way he always does. There are words. People are angry. They have every right to be. He screwed up. He let his emotions get in the way of his job, and it could very well cost him his career. But the man who's responsible for killing his father is dead. Jay killed him. He has the blood on his hands to prove it. At least his father is avenged. To hell with the rest of it.

He looks down at those same hands as Hank continues his tirade.

"You should be dead. Do you get that? You don't disobey a direct order! I don't care how angry you are!"

Someone has cleaned the blood off his hands, but they didn't get all of it. Some of it's still there, entrenched in the crevices of his palms. Those lines never used to be so deep or so defined. When did he get so old?

"...when your head is on straight," Hank finishes with a snarl, "we are gonna talk about this again."

Voight's price for freedom is eye contact, so Jay lifts his chin. He meets the eyes of the man he calls boss and forces a single word past his lips. "Alright." It's hoarse, but he hopes he's put enough fake emotion behind it, enough disingenuous understanding of the shit Hank's just spewed at him, to appease the guy. He seems to, and a moment later he's alone. And, glancing around the grimy, claustrophobic space of lower Wacker, he realizes just how much. His teammates are conspicuously absent. He can see Ruzak leading Upton away from the crime scene, his head close to hers as he whispers something in her ear, his arm wrapped around her shoulders. Those shoulders shake like she might be crying and he thinks about how that might be all his fault. They disappear around a corner. Atwater is nowhere to be seen and Olinsky is… well… he forgets there is no Olinski anymore sometimes. He can't quite remember where Antonio has been this whole time. Voight's still nearby, standing under the swirling lights of the police cars and talking to a few of the Uni's securing the scene. No one pays any attention to him so he slips the fresh t-shirt someone left for him over his head, ignoring the pull of the wound at his side and the fuzziness that overtakes everything when he stands up, and walks off the crime scene with no one noticing.

It takes Jay ten minutes of walking to remember he has no way to get home. Kelly dropped him off and he has no idea where the firefighter ended up after that. Normally he'd pay attention to things like that. But nothing about today has been normal. He fishes the cell phone out of his pocket, a pocket still wet with blood, ( _his, or the other guy's?_ ) and wonders who in the hell he's supposed to call. He stares at the contacts in his phone, at a loss for the first time in his life as to who would even want to talk to him. Will is always an option, but one look at his bloodstained pants and bandaged bullet hole, and his brother is going to insist he go straight to Med. There are other names in the list, names he should have deleted long ago, names of people who hate him, who would love nothing more than to kick him in the side, watch him go down, and laugh as he bled out on the sidewalk. People who have cursed his name but whom he still wishes to this day he could call and apologize to, because he completely destroyed their lives. People who left him, even some people he loved, still loves, but who he knows would never pick up if he called. So he scrolls past them all and dials Uber instead, hoping to God he doesn't bleed all over the backseat of some poor schmuck's car before they can get him home.

Jay hops into the back of a nice looking Honda Odyssey van that pulls up to the curb beside him 20 minutes later and barely remembers anything after that. The driver, a nervous looking elderly woman who has no business ferrying people around the city of Chicago at her age and on her own, glances at him nervously from the rearview mirror when he settles in with a groan. She looks like she wants to say something. He can't tell if she's the type of grandmotherly woman to inquire after his health, or swear an oath to a deity he's never heard of to chase him into an early grave if he dares get blood all over her fine upholstery. Thankfully, a quick flash of his badge and gruff instructions on where to drop him off silences her for the rest of the ride.

Jay lets his head rest against the back of the seat and drifts. It occurs to him that maybe he should have told someone he was leaving. It still amazes him that he was able to talk that new paramedic into not transporting him over to Med immediately to begin with. A gunshot wound to the abdomen, even if it was just a through and through that didn't hit anything vital… he seemed to vaguely remember protocol dictating he at _least_ get checked out by an ER doc. But there had been no demand that he shut up, suck it up, and let the paramedics take him over to Med. No one had even offered to take him over. In fact, his teammates could barely even look at him, Hailey the only one who even asked if he was ok. Just more evidence of this... theory he's been developing.

Now, it's still in the developmental phase, but Jay is pretty sure he's disappearing. It's been happening for a while now. In fact, he can feel it happening right now. As each beat of his heart pushes a little of his blood out of the wound at his side, he's slowly losing himself. He has a feeling it started with Mouse. But it didn't start to really hemorrhage until Erin. Now it gets more pronounced with every mistake, every fuck up, every case gone sideways. He's becoming invisible, obsolete. Pretty soon they won't even see him anymore. Just like they didn't see him today. After he was shot. In the gut. And nobody cared and told him it was okay to go home.

Jay looks down at his shirt, staring at the evidence of today for confirmation it actually happened. It's right there beneath the tan button up he doesn't remember putting back on, steadily growing wider and darker. A hole in his side where everything is leaking out of him with no hope of all of it being stuffed back in again. There's no denying that's real. And the wound at his side throbs for a moment, as if to prove the point.

Jay's vision swims as the Uber driver swerves them in and out of the steady mid-day traffic. He feels hot all of a sudden, like his skin is too tight, and he's nauseous, too. He rolls down the car window and lets a sewer tainted breeze ripple across his sweaty brow. The rest of the events of the day are pulled into the car along with it. Memories of the moment he killed Mendoza pop into his mind and repeat over and over again as he keeps his eyelids shut tight against the breeze and that rising tide of nausea that keeps threatening to overtake him. He gets lost in those memories for a moment, the minute details of it all; the mistakes he's made and their inevitable consequences, until suddenly the car is screeching to a halt in front of his building. He nearly screams when his wound is jostled, but somehow manages to bite it back. He's been hurt before, and worse than this. What he needs is a break, a chance to recharge. A few hours alone in an empty apartment to lick his wounds and swallow down some aspirin to try and take away a little of the sting. Will isn't expecting him for hours. They're going to clear out his father's apartment together because the landlord is being a dick. He's already hounding them to get a dead man's possessions out of his building so he can renovate with the insurance money and try to attract a more reputable tenant base. The whole thing makes Jay sick, but he doesn't need to worry about all that yet. He can take a few hours for himself, pull himself back together a little bit. Get this damn clawing nausea under control. Quiet the incessant pounding in his head.

Jay tosses more cash than he means to into the front seat of the Uber, and stumbles out onto the sidewalk. He doesn't look back to see if he's left any blood behind. The more adrenaline he burns through, the worse the pain in his stomach gets, so he focuses everything he has left on making it up the steep front steps leading up to his apartment and letting himself in the door.

His apartment is just the reprieve he needs. With all the blinds still drawn, it's dark and cool inside. It's also still pretty early in the day and the scent of his morning coffee still lingers in the air. It's a refreshing departure from blood, antiseptic, sewer and Uber he's become so accustomed to. He breathes it in happily as he makes a beeline for his couch, remembering only at the last minute that his pants are still wet and tacky with blood. He detours to the bedroom instead and begins the arduous task of undressing.

It's a more difficult business than it should be. With no adrenaline left to cushion the movements, it's like raw nerves against raw nerves, bone against bone. By the time he's finally stripped the t-shirt from his torso he's drenched in sweat and surprised by how much fresh blood there is. The bandage is completely soaked and is no longer anything more than a grotesque mess of gauze and partially coagulated blood, covering a hole in his skin. He pokes at an edge, watching absently as a rivulet of red makes its way down his torso and disappears into the waistband of his already soaked jeans. The slow trickle of crimson and the mess it's made of the thigh of his jeans, fascinates him. For a through and through, it sure is bleeding a lot.

Ignoring another wave of nausea and explaining away the odd little way the room keeps trying to tilt on him on the apartment's notoriously uneven floorboards, Jay steps into the tiny bathroom just off his bedroom and flips on the overhead light. Garish light sends daggers into his eyes and makes the nausea worse, so he flips it off, content to do his work in the dark. It's familiar work anyway. The kind of work that comes with the job. If he got checked out for every little scrape and bruise he got while working for the CPD, he'd be a regular at Med. They could name a wing after him. Lord knows his family has given enough of themselves to that place to deserve it.

Jay peels the completely soaked bandage away from the wound and tries not to hiss as the dried parts pull at his broken skin. Blood oozes but a cool washcloth run under the tap and swept through the mess makes quick work of that. Looking too closely at the torn flesh makes him want to hurl, so he covers it up as quickly as he can, not bothering to hold back a groan when he forgets himself and presses down a little too firmly on the new bandage to secure the sticky edges to his skin. Black starts trying to invade the edges of his vision and he takes a moment to rest both hands against the sink and pull in a few steadying breaths. He runs the taps again, a trickle of cool water against his hot skin a welcome respite from the steadily growing heat in his body. When he looks in the mirror, water dripping down from his hairline and off the edge of his nose, he hardly recognizes the face staring back at him. It's grey and drawn with pain and he can barely stand to look at himself.

Wound re-bandaged and energy nearly drained, Jay tosses the ruined washcloth into the trash and makes his weary way back to his bedroom. He's dizzy and the pain in his side throbs painfully and he can't even remember if the paramedic gave him anything at the scene for it. When he tries to recall what she did or what she said, the memories are there, but they're nothing more than a jumbled mess in his brain. He can't even remember how he got home anymore and looks around his empty bedroom in confusion. It's a mess in here with clothes and crap strewn about. When Erin was here, he had a reason to keep things clean. Now, he could care less because there's no one in his life any more who would care what state his bedroom was in.

Jay collapses onto the edge of his bed and swipes the sweat beading on his brow off with a shaky hand. That's a new development. The shaking wasn't there before, and he's not entirely sure when it started. He holds both hands up in front of his face and studies the tremors idly. Closing them into fists doesn't help. The tremor just travels into his wrist and down his arm, spreading out from there until his entire body is quaking. His fingers blur in and out of focus and the world starts to tilt... But before he can worry about why that might be a bad thing, he's pulled back to awareness by a banging at his door.

Jay stills and listens intently, letting his hands fall back down to the bed, not entirely sure he didn't just hallucinate the knocking. But it comes again and this time it's a lot louder than he's expecting and it startles him enough that he actually goes for his sidearm. But his gun isn't where it should be, and twisting his body to reach for it is probably the worst thing he could have done. The instant and unapologetic agony in his side makes him suck in a lungful of air through clenched teeth as tears that have nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with pain leak from the sides of his eyes. His chest seizes, and for a minute, it refuses to move at all. He squeezes his eyes shut, clinging desperately to consciousnesses and the edge of his bed as white stars explode behind his eyelids. His visitor, seeming neither to care about this recent turn of events, nor his rapidly deteriorating state, continues to pound on the door.

"Alright, alright. I'm coming," Jay rasps, the words coming out as little more than hoarse whispers, even with the hand he puts on his chest to try and calm his breathing. Somehow he manages to pull himself off the bed again and, shuffling slowly over to the door, uses one hand to press protectively against the wound at his side, and the other to keep himself upright. He uses anything that looks it might hold his weight: the bookshelf, a chest of drawers belonging to his mom that he stole from the house after moving out. But the mere act of walking is more than his body can take, and inches from the door, his legs finally give out beneath him and he lands in an ungraceful heap on the floor. Normally this wouldn't have been much of a problem except this time he goes down hard and is pretty sure he screams when he can't twist in time to avoid landing on his injured side.

Before when his vision blurred, he was able to clear it after a few moments of careful blinking. Now no matter what he does, he can't make anything focus. The sound of blood rushing in his ears combined with the now incessant pounding at his door and someone screaming his name. It all fills his head until it's near bursting. Were he able, he would have pulled his hands up to cover his ears. But his arms are nothing but useless extensions of flesh on the floor beside him now and he no longer possesses the strength to move them.

Someone kicks in his door and splinters of wood and dust cascade down around him, stinging as the bigger pieces pepper the uncovered flesh of his back. He watches them float to the ground in front of his face as he's roughly rolled onto his back and a hand clamps down mercilessly over the hole in his side.

There are no words to describe the sound he makes next. Wild. Animalistic. Whatever the descriptor, those aren't human noises clawing their way out of his throat as he fights against the unimaginable pain ripping through his lower half and greying out the world until there's nothing left but heat and pressure and agony. Sometimes he hears voices trying to penetrate the din, but they make little sense to him, even though some of them are familiar. One calls out for an ambulance. Another, an even more familiar one that reminds him of home and things he's lost, just lost, things that still sting and make him want to just find a dark corner of the world and die in it, calls out his name and begs him to just breathe and stay with him, and he tries. He really fucking tries. Because that's what their father said to always do. No matter the circumstances, no matter the cost, you keep fighting. Keep fighting until you can't keep fighting anymore. Push until your heart sputters out in your chest through no fault of your own. So he does. He holds on until his heart really does it. Holds out until that little theory of his (you know, the one about disappearing) finally does come true and he's lost to the world forever...

Or so he thinks.

The first time Jay manages to pry his his eyes open again, he's pretty certain he's dead. He floats in a sea of medically induced fog and there are faces and voices swirling around him in a hazy white light. Will is there, standing over him, calling out his name a times, telling him to relax at others; trying to tell him something that sounds a lot like everything is going to be okay. He's not really sure he believes him, but the pain is gone so at least there's that. Surely this is what heaven must look like, if he deserved to go to such a place.

The second time is less ethereal and more terrifying. The heat beneath his skin is back with a vengeance and he keeps trying to tell someone about it, only there's this thing in his throat that keeps him from trying. The pain is there too, clawing its way back up his body from the hole in his side where he can feel himself leaking out again. He wants so desperately to stem the flow, but his arms and legs just won't cooperate. He tries and he tries until he can't try any longer. His back rises up from the bed with a silent scream only he can hear, and the blackness of oblivion rushes in to claim him without his permission.

The third time is completely different. That's when things start to stick. When, as he pries his sleep encrusted eyes open to the sight of a hospital ICU room and his brother asleep in a chair beside his bed, he knows he's going to remember all this. Just like he knows that he's not going to be afraid of the next time he'll need to close his eyes. He's alive, and back to being firmly rooted to the world, and that's important to him for some reason.

The invader in his throat is gone, he notices as he shifts on the bed and stifles a cough. It's been replaced by something equally as annoying yet far less invasive, snaking its way across his upper lip. He contemplates pulling it off but he has so little energy, he decides against it. Yeah, the thing is going to drive him mad eventually, same as the incessant beeping of the heart monitor positioned somewhere behind his head, but at least he's alive. All of its proof that he survived and did not die on the floor of his apartment like his disjointed memories keep trying to suggest.

Jay thinks about making more noise to rouse Will, but the come-hither pull of sleep is just too strong to ignore. This time, he falls into its embrace willingly.

The fourth time he wakes up, other people start believing he's back as well. They start trusting him with information, like how he nearly died and how Will never left his side, not even for a second. His brother can't really bring himself to talk to Jay much about what happened, so he learns that his "through and through" wasn't so through and through as everyone originally thought from his doctors. They tell him things like how the bullet that tore through his side actually managed to do some pretty significant damage, and how that damage should have toppled him a lot sooner than it did. They trust him with the knowledge that he lost almost as much blood as one person can lose before they die. There's talk of fevers and infections and days of frustration when they weren't sure if he was going to pull through. Will is never in the room when these conversations take place, and Jay can't fault his brother for running. The eldest Halstead nearly had to bury two family members this month. Jay can cut him some slack.

What his brother lacks for in details about what it was really like during those hectic first few weeks when Jay was so sick, he makes up for in hovering. Will hardly leaves Jay's side, and then only when he or the nurses insist Will go home and get some rest and a shower. He mother hens Jay to the point of frustration, flittering near his bedside like a little lost puppy, fetching anything and everything Jay might need until it nearly drives him mad. But it seems to make Will feel better, so he endures it.

His unit doesn't visit much, but Jay kind of expected that. He's been pushing them all away for so long, and damage like that doesn't just miraculously heal itself overnight, no matter how close to death he might have come. As much as Hollywood might try to prove otherwise, one tearful bedside confession isn't going to make this all just go away. He still screwed up with Mendoza. He still lashed out - sometimes cruelly - at the people who were just trying to protect him. So he tries not to take it personally as the days pass and he sees very few members of the CPD Intelligence unit darken his hospital room doorway. Severide makes a few appearances and Jay finds some peace in the firefighter's laid-back energy and calming demeanor. He thinks these visits might have just a little something to do with guilt, but for now Jay is just happy to have a friend.

It's two more days before they move him from the ICU and another agonizing week after that before there's talk of letting Will take him home. By day three in the regular room, he's practically climbing the walls, and throws himself into his PT with a vigor unseen by the doctors before now. He thinks they maybe release him a few days earlier than they should because they're worried he might re-injure himself in his haste to recover. Jay doesn't care one way or the other and soon he's climbing the steep front stairs to his apartment, his brother shuffling along silently behind him, four weeks and a day since that fateful day on Lower Wacker.

Jay's not sure what to expect with his apartment. What little memory he has of collapsing involved a lot of blood and pain and maybe a broken piece of furniture, or two. He had not been in a good headspace even before all this happened and the place had been a mess of filthy laundry and dirty dishes. As he turns the key in the lock, he silently prays there's no grotesque pool of blood on the floor waiting there to greet him.

It's not. In fact, the apartment he walks into is spotless, and smells mildly of lemons. He steps into the place, lets his bag of personal belongings fall to the floor beside his feet, and takes it all in. His kitchen is spotless, nary a dirty dish in sight. The clothes he had strewn about are gone and there isn't speck of dust in the place. Someone even attacked his book shelves, and he knows for a fact there was at least an inch of dust on those things from before. The pristine floorboards shine warmly in the late afternoon sun streaming in from open curtains. There are no particles floating in the shafts of sunlight. The apartment is clean, orderly, and Jay finds himself pulling in a deep sigh of relief.

The sight of the apartment makes him feel better somehow. Like he can start this business of healing with a fresh start. It feels somehow like a blank slate.

"Thanks," he finds himself muttering to Will as his brother breezes in and closes the front door behind him.

"For what?"

"For all this," Jay replies, gesturing towards the clean apartment. Will even sorted his mail into neat little piles on the table.

"As much as I would like to say all this was my doing, it wasn't," Will admits, moving off to the kitchen to put away some of the groceries he brought along with him when he picked Jay up this afternoon. But not before giving Jay a once over like he's still worried he might topple over at any minute or something.

"You didn't?" It makes sense, he figures. When did his brother have any time to come over and clean?

"Nope," Will replies simply, sniffing an errant carton of milk from the fridge. It's probably been in there since before Jay's shooting. Judging by the face Will pulls, he's guessed right. The half full bottle hits the bottom of the trashcan with a satisfying thunk.

"Then who did?"

"I think it was Hailey, Ruzak, and Antonio. They were the ones who swung by to pick up your apartment key, anyway." Will ducks his head back into the refrigerator and Jay contemplates this information for a minute. His partner... Ruzak. Even Antonio. His teammates. They were here. Maybe even the whole unit showed up to do this. All of them helping him out, even after months of distance and hostility on his part. They cared enough to clean his home… like maybe they were searching for a fresh start as much as he was. "Why don't you go wash up and I'll make us some lunch?"

Jay nods, and makes his way to the bedroom. It's in as pristine a condition as the rest of the apartment. He tosses the clear plastic bag of his belongings onto the bed and makes his way slowly into the bathroom. He's happy to be home, but his body still aches from he trauma he's suffered. The trauma he'll likely relive in his nightmares for a while now that he's off the IV pain meds.

Turning on the faucet, Jay fills a glass about half full with water and downs the whole thing in one gulp. The face in the mirror watching him do all this is more gaunt than he remembers, and it occurs to him that he hasn't seen his own reflection in over a month. His cheekbones are more pronounced and there are purplish blue smudges beneath his eyes, but the green in his eyes is still bright. Not even a bullet was enough to put out that particular spark. Being at home has re-energized something inside of him, and seeing the lengths his co-workers went to to make sure he came home to a clean apartment and a fresh start, is more reparative than any visit from them in the hospital ever could be. He'd be a fool to think that this in any way makes what happened alright, but for now, at least, he thinks it's a pretty good start.

The End.

* * *

 _A big thanks to LadyRiesling and fyeahvulnerablemen for the beta_


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